The nature of informal economies is structured by conflict between governmental strategies of confinement, to places, times and how things are done, and the transgression of these confines by informal actors in pursuit of survival or advantage. This article examines the influential development program of formalization in the context of these conflicts. Informality can be formalized in two ways, by eradication and by regularization. Building on their past ethnographic research on informality, the authors use released confidential Hong Kong colonial government documents to explore the informal discussions among policy makers about how to respond to informal practices, and how their understanding of street vendors influences their chose of confinement strategies. While insisting on eradication for squatters, various forms of regularization were attempted for street vendors.
BBC News (2016) Hong Kong’s Mong Kok clashes: More than fishballs. 9February.
2.
BhowmikS (2012) Street Vendors in the Global Urban Economy. New York: Taylor and Francis.
3.
BromleyR (1978) Organization, regulation and exploitation in the so-called ‘urban informal sector’: The street traders of Cali, Colombia. World Development6: 1161–1171.
4.
BrowneKE (2004) Creole Economics: Caribbean Cunning under the French Flag. Austin: University of Texas Press.
5.
CrossJC (1998) Informal Politics: Street Vendors and the State in Mexico City. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
6.
De HerdtTSardanJ-PO de (2015) Real Governance and Practical Norms in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Game of the Rules. London: Routledge.
7.
De SotoH (1989) The Other Path: The Economic Answer to Terrorism. New York: Harper and Row.
8.
De SotoH (2000) The Mystery of Capital. New York: Basic Books.
9.
Durand-LasserveA (2006) Informal settlements and the Millennium Development Goals: Global policy debates on property ownership and security of tenure. Global Urban Development2: 1–15.
10.
EtzoldB (2013) The Politics of Street Food: Contested Governance and Vulnerabilities in Dhaka’s Field of Street Vending. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag.
FoucaultM (1979) Discipline and Punish. London: Peregrine Books.
13.
FoucaultM (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
14.
GandolfoD (2013) FORMLESS: A day at Lima’s Office of Formalization. Cultural Anthropology28: 278–298.
15.
GhertnerDA (2010) Calculating without numbers: Aesthetic governmentality in Delhi’s slums. Economy and Society39: 185–217.
16.
GilbertA (2002) On the mystery of capital and the myths of Hernando de Soto: What difference does legal title make?International Development Planning Review24: 1–19.
17.
GilbertA (2012) De Soto’s The Mystery of Capital: Reflections on the book’s public impact. International Development Planning Review34: v–xviii.
18.
GoldmanM (2008) Imperial Nature: The World Bank and Struggles for Social Justice in the Age of Globalization. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
19.
GraaffKHaN (2015) Street Vending in the Neoliberal City: A Global Perspective on the Practices and Policies of a Marginalized Economy. New York: Berghahn Books.
20.
GuptaA (2012) Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence, and Poverty in India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
21.
HansenKTLittleWMilgramL (2013) Street Economies in the Urban Global South. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
22.
HeymanJMSmartA (1999) States and illegal practices: An overview. In: HeymanJM (ed.) States and Illegal Practices. Oxford: Berg, pp. 1–24.
23.
KingAY-C (1991) Kuan-hsi and network building: A sociological interpretation. Daedalus120: 63–84.
24.
La GrangeAPretoriusF (2016) State-led gentrification in Hong Kong. Urban Studies53: 506–523.
25.
LomnitzLA (1988) Informal exchange networks in formal systems: A theoretical model. American Anthropologist90: 42–55.
26.
McGeeTG (1974) Hawkers in Hong Kong: A Study of Policy and Planning in the Third World City. Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong.
27.
McFarlaneCWaibelM (2012) Urban Informalities: Reflections on the Formal and Informal. Farnham: Ashgate
28.
MilgramBL (2015) From street to store to shopping mall: Extralegal zones of commerce for pirated audio-visual goods in Baguio, the Philippines. SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia30: 742–779.
29.
MingioneEGoodrickP (1991) Fragmented Societies: A Sociology of Economic Life beyond the Market Paradigm. Oxford: Blackwell.
30.
MukhijaV (2003) Squatters as Developers? Slum Redevelopment in Mumbai. Aldershot: Ashgate.
31.
MukhijaVLoukaitou-SiderisA (2014) The Informal American City: Beyond Taco Trucks and Day Labor. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
32.
NarotzkySBesnierN (2014) Crisis, value, and hope: rethinking the economy. Current Anthropology55: S4–S16.
33.
Obeng-OdoomF (2013) The mystery of capital or the mystification of capital?Review of Social Economy71: 427–442.
34.
PasquettiS (2015) Entrapped transnationalism: West Bank and Israeli Palestinians between closeness and distance. Ethnic and Racial Studies38: 2738–2753.
35.
PodmoreD (1971) The population of Hong Kong. In: HopkinsK (ed.) Hong Kong: The Industrial Colony. Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, pp. 21–54.
36.
RobinsonJ (2002) Global and world cities: A view from off the map. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research26: 531–554.
37.
RoyA (2009) Why India cannot plan its cities: Informality, insurgence and the idiom of urbanization. Planning Theory8: 76–87.
38.
RoyA (2011) Slumdog cities: Rethinking subaltern urbanism. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research35: 223–238.
39.
RoyAAlSayyadN (eds) (2004) Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
40.
SalazarNSmartA (2011) Introduction: Anthropological takes on (im)mobility. Identities18: i–ix.
41.
SatalineSRentonA (2015) Closing time: How Hong Kong’s hawkers face a struggle to survive. South China Morning Post. Available at: http://multimedia.scmp.com/hawkers (accessed 3 March 2015).
42.
ScottJC (1998) Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
43.
SmartA (2002) Agents of eviction: The squatter control and clearance division of Hong Kong’s Housing Department. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography23: 333–347.
44.
SmartA (2003) Impeded self-help: Toleration and the proscription of housing consolidation in Hong Kong’s squatter areas. Habitat International27: 205–225.
45.
SmartA (2006) The Shek Kip Mei Myth: Squatters, Fires and Colonial Rule in Hong Kong, 1950–63. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.
46.
SmartA (2010) The strength of property rights, prospects for the disadvantaged, and constraints on the actions of the politically powerful in Hong Kong and China. In: WuFWebsterC (eds) Marginalization in Urban China: Comparative Perspectives. London: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 90–111.
47.
SmartALeeJ (2003) Financialization and the role of real estate in Hong Kong’s regime of accumulation. Economic Geography79: 153–171.
SmartASmartJ (2013) Formalizing Hong Kong: Explaining governmental efforts to eradicate and control urban informality. Social Transformations in Chinese Societies9: 55–78.
50.
SmartJ (1989) The Political Economy of Street Hawking in Hong Kong. Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies.
51.
TanasescuAChuiESmartA (2010) Tops and bottoms: State tolerance of illegal housing in Hong Kong and Calgary. Habitat International34: 478–484.
52.
UzzellD (1990) Dissonance of formal and informal planning styles, or can formal planners do bricolage?City and Society4: 114–130.
53.
VarleyA (2002) Private or public: Debating the meaning of tenure legalization. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research26: 449–462.
54.
WedelJ (2009) Shadow Elite: How the World’s New Power Brokers Undermine Democracy, Government, and the Free Market. New York: Basic Books.
55.
YiftachelO (2009) Theoretical notes on ‘gray cities’: The coming of urban apartheid. Planning Theory8: 88–100.
